Spiffy:

Iffy:

Will the single-player campaign deliver on its earlier promises?

Perhaps more than any other first-person shooter series, the Red Faction franchise has always been about blowing stuff up. The original title was one of the first games to rely heavily on geometry-based destruction, while allowed players to blast holes in walls (after all, who needs doors?) or take down an entire structure on top of enemies. To many, the second game was actually a step back, limiting the amount of exploration as well as the use of the GeoMod technology. Thankfully, Volition decided to go back to its roots for the latest game in the series, Red Faction: Guerrilla. We had a chance to play the game for ourselves at a recent THQ event, and it looks like the franchise is back on track.

Although most of our time with Red Faction: Guerrilla was spent checking out the multiplayer action, we did manage to learn a little bit more about the game's single-player campaign. When the story picks up, Mars has been terraformed and populated, making it look quite a bit different than it did in the first game. It's not as lawless as it once was, mainly due to the efforts of the EDF, which controls the red planet with an iron fist, imposing martial law on its citizens. Your character's brother has been killed by the EDF's forces, and your family's land has been seized so that it can be stripped of resources that will be sent back to Earth. In fighting against the EDF, you can join up with other guerrillas groups that are waging a secret war against the oppressors.

The biggest change that's been made to the core Red Faction gameplay is to the perspective. While the first two games were presented from a first-person view, Red Faction: Guerrilla is a fairly standard third-person shooter, albeit one that has some pretty unique gameplay mechanics. The game will also be an open-world title, although obviously we don't yet know just how wide-open it'll really be. What we do know is that you'll have the ability to affect the environment around you by, to put it simply, blowing it to hell. The developers mentioned that destroyed structures will stay that way, potentially changing later parts of the game.

The ability to destroy even the thickest walls and obstructions isn't only in the single-player game, however, as it will also make an appearance in the variety of multiplayer modes that the game supports. In addition to old standbys like Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, you'll also be able to do battle with 15 of your closest frenemies in gametypes like Damage Control, which could best be described as attack and defend with a destructive twist, and Siege, in which you'll be tasked with smashing your way through multiple walls before destroying a centrally-located objective.